He's forty-nine now and, though almost as famous for being a family man as he is for being an actor, he still does most of his talking about arrival or about moving on. Today it's about arrival: He has just gotten back to L.A. after spending spring break at his home north of Santa Barbara and camping the night before with his partner, Angelina Jolie, along with their children and a few of their friends. He's tired — "I woke up way too early and way too wet. But it was really fun. Six kids — six of 'em. Including one of our young ones. Angie as well. It's a great thing, a great thing. Then we drove nine kids three hours in an Econovan. The kind you take a crew in, with bench seats. No other vehicle is big enough. There's no car we fit in as a family. Everything else holds seven, eight tops. An SUV only holds seven. And we had nine — our six and three friends. Eleven, including us. It's no frills, man. I'd love to have it all tricked out, shag carpet on all four walls. But we live in a different world. We rent our vehicles. We don't want things so identifiable because we don't want to get followed. We spend a lot of time trying to evade the paparazzi. It's a big annoyance. But everything in life's a trade-off...."

Pitt has arrived back in town for work, and he is speaking from a low leather chair on the first floor of a building devoted to postproduction on the Paramount lot. He is wearing a long-sleeved black jersey, dad-sized jeans of such stiff and unbroken denim that their creases form a jagged outline, and black motorcycle boots. His hair, surfer-blond at the ends, is pulled into a short ponytail, and his whiskers, gray as an old dog's muzzle, cover a face resolutely golden in color and grainy in texture. He's wearing large sunglasses. When he takes them off, he reveals eyes that are blue and tired and wary, animated by alternating currents of curiosity and self-regard, and each bracketed by wrinkles that resemble a child's drawing of the sun. He has a neck full of gold chains, tokens of his aesthetic alliance to the seventies. He is bigger than you might think, and his ears are smaller, almost decorative. He is slightly pigeon-toed, with a rolling production of a walk suitable to a man who wears spurs. He has imposingly white teeth and a habit of sticking out his lower jaw when contemplating a question that makes him look as though he's imitating Brando in The Godfather. He has employed the same makeup artist for twenty-three years, Jean Black, and she applauds him for allowing his face to show its age, on- and off-camera, and indeed for using all the wear and tear as another kind of prop in his performances. "He's not fighting it," she says, and yet he is both rueful and amused that one of the things that attracted him to World War Z is that he didn't have to work out for it — that he could play a hero without having to hang a six-pack.

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In obeisance to the dictates of his family, he has not worked in a week. Upstairs, however, on the third floor, a half dozen or so people in the employ of his production company, Plan B, have been laboring to complete World War Z until they've turned pale as mine workers or, more to the point, zombies. World War Z (out June 21) is Brad Pitt's "zombie movie," of course — a movie that he took on to see if he could make a movie that his sons could enjoy, a forthrightly commercial venture he hoped would serve as the foundation of his first commercial franchise. Instead, it turned into a notoriously "troubled production," fraught with reported cost overruns and creative differences. Pitt dismisses the notion that Z has been any more troubled than any other enormously troubled movie. He says that its notoriety came about "because of me — there's a big bull's-eye on my back." What he does admit is that Z is a "big, big bet" for both Plan B and Paramount, "with a lot of money on the table," and that he had a lot to learn about what it takes to make a big commercial movie. "You gotta be able to make it pop," he says. "You have to keep paying off, keep paying off, and in order to do that you have to be able to set the trap and snap it at the right moment. There are guys who are just great at that, and I didn't understand how technically sharp you have to be to pull off some of that stuff."

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Pitt selected Marc Forster to direct the movie because he thought Forster would know how to keep building character even when his character is living up to his summertime obligation to kick some undead ass. Pitt wound up spending a lot of time finding people who knew how to keep building tension while Forster was building character and, in Pitt's words, "respected the rhythms" of action movies. He wound up being "more hands on" than he ever thought he would be, until World War Z was as much a Brad Pitt movie as it was a Marc Forster movie and belonged to him in a way no movie ever had. Though its $200 million budget came from disparate and anxious sources, he owned it — and that turns out to be how he likes making movies and everything else.

He says he left Missouri because of "an itch," and he says that the itch he felt then still guides him now. But what kind of itch is it, exactly? He makes movies. He makes wines. He makes furniture. He redesigns houses and works with an architectural firm to design apartment buildings and hotels. He's assembling whole neighborhoods in areas of abandonment and blight in three American cities and counting. He collects and races motorcycles. He has six kids. He's engaged to one of the most beautiful and famous and demanding women in the world. Quietly and very slowly, as if trying to remember the words of a childhood prayer, he describes his life this way:

"I have very few friends. I have a handful of close friends and I have my family and I haven't known life to be any happier. I'm making things. I just haven't known life to be any happier."

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